1 Copyright © 2006 by ASME Proceedings of IDETC/CIE 2006 ASME 2006 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference September 10-13, 2006, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA DETC2006-99561 AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENT REFLECTIONS FROM A MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CLASS Jonathan H Hey, Alan P Van Pelt and Alice M Agogino Department of Mechanical Engineering University of California at Berkeley, CA 94720 USA {jono;alanvp;agogino}@berkeley.edu ABSTRACT New Product Development (NPD) classes based around problem-based learning provide an effective vehicle for authentic learning and realistic design experiences. Self- reflection provides one mechanism to expose learning accomplishments to the instructor and help the students develop self-assessment skills for professional practice. As one component of a self-assessment learning process this paper describes a structured ‘lessons learned’ exercise that focuses on what the students themselves found to be the salient learning experiences when engaging in a multidisciplinary product development process. We present an analysis of over 1200 ‘lessons learned’ collected from three years of a graduate multidisciplinary NPD class with students from engineering, information studies, architecture, business and industrial design. Students highlighted skills for working in multidisciplinary teams as their most important learning experience, whereas the area of greatest impact in the NPD process was the gathering and analysis of customer and user needs. By breaking down these sections we draw insights into students' learning experiences and provide implications for design education in terms of skill sets required and recommended course emphases. Keywords: Design, lessons learned, reflection, assessment, user needs, need-finding 1. INTRODUCTION Assessing what students learn during a product development class is a difficult task [1-3]. There are shortcomings with most common assessment methods. Although a written test might assess content or process knowledge, it will not capture or reliably assess the practical and teamwork skills that are built up during a group design project. A textbook understanding of the design process itself does not guarantee that the student can successfully apply the process in complex design situations. Grading the outcome of a design project, particularly with input from an industry jury, can provide a good indicator of a team's accomplishments, but what does it say about an individual student’s learning progress? A project that is not rated highly could have been the vehicle for tremendous learning. Nor do design project ratings get at what were the salient learning experiences to the students – the nuggets of experience they will carry with them towards their jobs as designers, managers and innovators. This predicament is summed up well below: “Despite the ubiquity of engineering design in curricula, little is known about what students learn in engineering design courses” [4] One dual purpose approach to assessing students' learning experiences in a New Product Development (NPD) class is to ask the students themselves what they learned. Not only does this approach provide insight into the student experience, it also serves to build their lifelong skills in self-reflection as argued by Schön to be a critical tool for what he called the 'self- reflective practitioner' [5]. This paper presents the qualitative analysis of the responses of what students themselves said they learned from three years of a multidisciplinary graduate-level NPD class using a project- based learning approach. Over the last three years, approximately 200 students and more than 1200 individual lessons learned statements were collected. At the end of each class, students are asked to reflect on and share the key lessons learned throughout the class. Lessons vary on their specificity and content, but typically take the form of short phrases such as: